May 15, 2018

"He’d say, ‘You don’t stay in character?’ I’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, Chris, I’ve been Lois Lane for a year, all you do is look left, I can handle it.’ And I’d pull out my book and he’d get very cross."

[I]n 1996, she endured what she later jokingly called the “biggest nervous breakdown in history, bar possibly Vivien Leigh’s,” a reference to the troubled “Gone With the Wind” star. “If you’re gonna fall apart,” she advised, “do it in your own bedroom.”

Her collapse, she said, was triggered by a virus on her laptop that erased years of work on a memoir. The loss sent her spiraling. She became convinced that her first husband, author Thomas McGuane, was trying to kill her with the help of the CIA. She slashed her hair and removed several teeth in a bid to go unrecognized.

Over the course of three days, she wandered the streets and narrowly escaped being raped. She was found disheveled, penniless and disoriented in the back yard of a home in Glendale, Calif., and was taken to a private psychiatric clinic for evaluation....

That's the detail I never forgot about her: She was so mentally troubled that she pulled out some of her teeth. I looked to see if pulling one's own teeth is at all common in mental illness. What I found was "Pulling Teeth to Treat Mental Illness" (The Atlantic):

As medical director of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton between 1907 and 1930, [Henry Cotton] routinely practiced what he called "surgical bacteriology," the extracting of potentially diseased parts of the head and body, based on the observation that people who run high fevers sometimes suffer hallucinations.

This "focal infection therapy" seemed so scientific and promising that Cotton and his assistants yanked more than 11,000 teeth.... Cotton's experiments were unethical and awful, but they weren't that illogical if you consider the knowledge that was available at the time....

If you had no idea about neurotransmitters or lobes, it makes a weird sort of sense that micro-infections in the head would be the true cause of schizophrenia... [W]e still don't know, say, the very best way to prevent schizophrenia....

But it doesn't say that Kidder had the deranged idea that her teeth were the cause of her psychological distress. It says she was trying to change her appearance so people wouldn't recognize her. I question the accuracy of that report (especially since it had to come from the person who was mentally ill enough to subject herself to such a painful, damaging ordeal).

Superman was a sweet and hokey flick, but in it Lex Luther did have a brilliant idea. He bought all the cheap land in places like Fresno, Stockton and Bakersfield - east of the majestic California coast line, and hijacked a nuclear missile to detonate in San Francisco to break off the cities into the Pacific Ocean, so that he would own all this new, expensive coastal property.

True, he didn't account for the nuclear fall-out and radiation, but it seemed like a devilish plan at the time.

I'm glad she found a semblance of balance and had a tranquil death. She was the best Lois Lane........I wonder if her status as a movie star amplified or diminished her problems. If you're a movie star, you're life is crazy, but.on the other hand, you get a lot of attention and you don't fall into hrough the cracks.

"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental disorder in which a person experiences a combination of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression or mania. The two types of schizoaffective disorder — both of which include some symptoms of schizophrenia — are:

"Bipolar type, which includes episodes of mania and sometimes major depression"Depressive type, which includes only major depressive episodes

"Schizoaffective disorder may run a unique course in each affected person, so it's not as well-understood or well-defined as other mental health conditions."

A good friend of mine lives in the same neighborhood over in Livingston. He would exchange pleasantries with Margot on his morning walks. He once told me, "She's a very nice lady." That's the kind of stuff I remember about people.

My step-monster said she had all her fillings removed and replaced because the mercury had put her on her deathbed. She advised one of my dad's friends in a wheelchair with MS to do the same with her teeth. It did not go down well.

Mental illness in actresses is not new. Gene Tierney had lots of mental problems, some possibly stimulated by her rubella syndrome baby. When she was entertaining troops in North Africa in the war, a woman fan snuck out of the hospital where she had German measles to meet the actress. She contracted it from the fan and her baby was terribly afflicted.

She was great as the barmaid/girlfriend in "Nichol's" which was James Garners favorite and I think best role. A one year series set in the West in 1914 it is pretty great. Garner plays a non violent Sherrif who rides a motorcycle instead of a horse. It was a pioneer as the killed off the main character in the last episode.

"He’d say, ‘You don’t stay in character?’Is this a common thing for actors, to stay in character even when they aren’t acting? That must be hard on their families. Not so good for their mental health, either. Do they ever get confused about where they stop and the character begins?

In forty years, the only patient I had who had teeth out for psychiatric reasons was one who wanted the pain medication he could get from extractions. He only had a few teeth left when he was sent to prison for a strange and violent crime.